Contemporary technologies have become embedded in our daily lives, and are influencing how we come to know, create, and express ourselves. New media of the Web 2.0 are transforming existing standards of knowledge, communication, and human interactions. These tools [email, FaceBook, or cell phones] and processes of communication [chatting, blogging, or video broadcasting] as they move across the interface are neither neutral tools nor determined outcomes. Communication today links over a billion people in real time through the Internet, with thought and images through the minimum unit of bits in 0s and 1s, and volumes of information that is updated by doubling every seventy three days.

Today, digital visual experiences that originate from newer imaging technologies are inherently embedded in our physical environment, invisibly integrated into everyday tasks, and increasingly mobile and interactive in our visual culture. This interface is a complex contour edge as it flows into the structure of human activity. Our actions and choices are thus complicated through the interface by the mediation of both external visible tools (e.g., pencils, scissors, and iPods) and internal invisible process (heuristics, culture, concepts, cognition, and strategies).

My research activities include engaging art education, technology, and culture as integrated processes and approaches to expand art educational technology practice.

Excerpt from: “Tillander, M. (in press). Digital Visual Culture: The Paradox of the [In]visible.” In R. Sweeny (Ed.). Digital Visual Culture: Interactions and Intersections in the 21st Century